SEATTLE, WA. Sage Bionetworks, Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM), University of Pennsylvania (Penn), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited (TAKEDA) have launched a Public-Private Pre-Competitive Consortium to generate and analyze large-scale genomic data from human subjects with neuropsychiatric disease and to make this data and the associated analytical results broadly available to the public. This collaboration brings together disease area expertise, large scale and well curated brain sample collections, and data management and analysis expertise from the respective institutions.

As many as 450 million people worldwide are believed to be living with a mental or behavioral disorder: schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are two of the top six leading causes of years lived with disability according to the World Health Organization. The burden on the individual as well as on society is significant with estimates for the health care costs for these individuals as high as four percent GNP. This highlights a grave need for new therapies to alleviate this suffering.

Researchers from MSSM including Dr. Pamela Sklar, Dr. Joseph Buxbaum and Dr. Eric Schadt will join with Dr. Raquel Gur and Dr. Chang-Gyu Hahn from Penn to combine their extensive brain bank collections for the generation of whole genome scale RNA and DNA sequence data. Dr. Pamela Sklar, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at MSSM commented “this is an exciting opportunity for us to use the newest genomic methods to really expand our understanding of the molecular underpinnings of neuropsychiatric disease”, while Dr Raquel Gur, Professor of Psychiatry from Penn observed “this will be a great complement to some of the large-scale genetic analyses that have been carried out to date because it will give a more complete mechanistic picture”.

Dr. Jonathan Derry, Vice President of Research at Sage Bionetworks noted, “We are truly thrilled to be partnering with some of the best brain researchers to generate an unprecedented scale of molecular data that we will make broadly available as a resource to the community through our data analysis and management platform Synapse.” Dr Thomas Lehner, Chief Genomics Research Branch at NIMH added, “The NIMH is particularly excited about this partnership that will leverage resources and expertise in both the public and the private sector to accelerate research into the causes and treatments of major mental illness”.

TAKEDA has provided seed funding for the effort that will look to expand in the future. The CommonMind Consortium is committed to generating an open resource for the community and invites others with common goals to contact us at info@CommonMind.org.